Top 328 Quotes & Sayings by James Joyce

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish novelist James Joyce.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

A nation is the same people living in the same place.
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. — © James Joyce
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.
Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. — © James Joyce
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
Nations have their ego, just like individuals.
If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.
I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.
Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.
I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.
My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.
While you have a thing it can be taken from you…..but when you give it, you have given it. no robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.
They lived and laughed and loved and left. — © James Joyce
They lived and laughed and loved and left.
Life is too short to read a bad book.
Absence, the highest form of presence.
Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.
Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies.
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.
The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously
Love loves to love love.
But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.
People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present. — © James Joyce
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
There's many a true word spoken in jest.
People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.
Wipe your glasses with what you know.
As I am. As I am. All or not at all.
No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.
Shut your eyes and see.
Fall if you will, but rise you must.
All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.
Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.
Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.
Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and a bottle.
All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.
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